Дэймон Найт - Orbit 12

She told him that she had returned as promised yesterday to receive from him the horoscope he was going to cast for her. What delicate expression! The girl should have joined the pantomimi , who use no words! Yet she was not so much a mistress of gesture that I could grasp at first whose the horoscope was; only as he tugged a scrip of paper from his sleeve and handed it to her did I understand that this was not hers but the young soldier’s horoscope! She was receiving Lasinio’s fate!

With precise timing, La Singla produced from the pocket tied by ribbon to her skirt one single silver coin and pressed it into the astrologer’s palm. Her posture as she reached upward was beautiful to see. The man managed to bow without rising from his chair. Straightway, she opened his scrip and cast her fair eyes down at what was written there. The exquisite droop of her wrist! The delicate retreat of colour from her face! The pretty way her lips opened and her affrighted fingertips flew in dismay to her brow! Her melting look of sorrow! What art!

From where I, a distant groundling, stood, the actress’ subtle cheironomy made the contents of the soldier’s horoscope as clear as if I scanned them myself.

Lasinio’s hours in the shadow play of life were numbered! She and the astrologer gestured, looked almost fearfully toward the east. Ah, Suliman, thy cruel sword! Thy conquering power against the giaour! Alas, poor Lasinio! So young! So soon! And the stars so rudely conjoined against thee!

With trembling limbs, with ashen countenance, La Singla tucked the paper into her breast and ran from the place, as in her last exit in the Albrizzi piece. And, at the last moment, her glances toward my place of concealment!

As I suspected—instinctive little actress though she was, her best was called out only by an audience; she had been aware all along that I watched her! A moment before—no more than a moment—and I had thought that she would rush straight to Lasinio with her grim tidings and persuade him to let the mercenaries leave at midnight without him. Now, weighing the meaning of that last glance of hers, I knew she was more art than heart! —Real though her anguish was, her delight in pantomime was more real. The Paris might well trundle off at midnight, but La Singla would not be inside; she preferred to play out her roles, not to eyes glazing in death before the walls of Tuscady, but to eyes that could appreciate to the full her capabilities. Her nature was such that military necessity would always have to bow before artistic temperament. In other words—the pleasure I had had with her the previous afternoon was but a beginning. . . .

Drenched though I was by my ducking, it was a Prian full of high hope who marched in to humiliate Lemperer and to berate him for his mistake. I noticed that La Singla slipped in at the side doorway. I made a grand entrance and confronted Lemperer before a dozen witnesses, dripping dramatically upon his carpetings.

“My dearest Prian, what a misfortune!” Up went his withered hands, expressing sorrow and remorse, as he skipped before me. “You of all people to be beaten up in the street like a common adulterer! What a sight you must have made, to be sure, and how the heartless wretches who saw you launched among the fishes must have bellowed with uncouth laughter! What a reluctant Neptune! What a paltry Poseidon!”

Arming myself against the titters of my friends, I said to him, “It’s no use apologising, Lemperer! You and I are parting company from this hour unless I have full recompense for such a villainous error by your henchmen!”

He grasped my arm, though daintily, and dragged me toward his inner office. “Come into my sanctum, dear boy, my poor aquatic dragoon, and let us talk privately. Why, even your feather’s drooping! We can sort this out with no hard feeling, I’m certain!”

Once we were in the room he closed the door behind us and locked it, continuing to talk with no change in tone, though a certain amount of venom mixed with the rheum in his eyes.

“But I would hate you to think my henchmen made any sort of error, my fishy loverboy! They don’t make errors. Oh, no! They’d know you in any getup, however unbecoming. They followed my dear little wife yesterday at noon, and saw you coax her up to your desperate room, and counted the hours before she left again, and then watched her meeting with that goat-blooded mercenary, Lasinio, and reported all to me. . . .”

With each conjunction, he was clouting me fiercely round the shoulders with his stick for emphasis.

“And I took appropriate action to deal with you both, and I paid the astrologer to cast a false horoscope for Lasinio, and I paid the bodyguard to pitch you into the canal, and I’m delighted to see that all went so well!”

“And you realise I am soaking your lovely Persian carpet! Is this what I get for trusting you? Why, I told Captain Lasinio to stay away from your wife, and now this is my reward!”

He burst into laughter. “You are for all the world like Karagog! In every role you have little success! Your lover was not much of a performance, your soldier was—if I may say so—a washout! You’d better stick to acting!”

I began to sneeze. “The chill of that canal has done for me. Like Lasinio, I’ll die young!”

“No catching cold!” His expression changed. “We don’t want you laid up—you aren’t getting out of The Visionaries as easily as that!” He ran forward to try and help me take off some of my wet clothes, snatching down a golden robe he had used for the part of Prospero not two weeks before. I sneezed the harder. Gradually his false concern turned real. Unlocking the door, he burst from the room crying for La Singla to come.

“Bring a compress! Minister to this palsied player—and try to keep your hands off him! We must have him fit for the evening’s performance, if he’s fit for nothing else!”

Two minutes more, and she was in my arms. But Phalante the Bankrupt was played before the Duke of Ragusa as an apothecary as usual, in ordinary apothecary’s clothes, without uniform.

The days in which I was recovering from a fever under my sister’s care seemed like a long afternoon in childhood, when eternity begins punctually after the midday meal, to linger on long beyond twilight in an odour of flowers and warm rooms. Their comfort and idleness were almost more enslaving than the fever.

The chamber assigned me as a nest was high in the Mantegan castle, overlooking the ragged roofs of an inner court. Despite its height, honeysuckle had climbed up to the window and beyond, to the eaves, clinging wirily to the pitted stonework. During my time in bed, the sound of bees filled the room, together with the pale scent of blossoms.

My sister Katerina sat by my bed for hours. She allowed nobody but her personal servant to attend me. Mostly, she looked after me herself. Katerina was my one surviving sister. I would rouse and open an eye and there she would be, patiently sitting; I would drift off into a realm of feverish dreams, imagining her gone, and then open my eyes again, to the luxury of finding her still there. As I recovered, she took to sitting by the window, stroking her lovely amber-coloured cat, Poseidon, or working at her embroidery.

She still remained during my convalescence, tranquil by the sunlight, while I lolled in the shade of the room, weak from the effects of my illness, and we turned old times into spasmodic conversation.

“I’m truly grateful for your care, Katie. Now the summer is here, let’s see more of one another than we have managed recently.”

“I’m glad of the wish—and yet forces operate in life to separate people, whatever they wish.”